1. Technical Field
The present invention is related to data transfer. More particularly, the present invention provides a method for dynamic management of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) reassembly buffers in hardware (e.g., in a TCP/IP offload engine (TOE)).
2. Related Art
One of the challenges of efficient TCP implementation in hardware is the reassembly of an original byte stream from out-of-order TCP segments using reassembly buffers. Management and flexibility of the reassembly buffers plays a significant role in the TCP implementation.
One known solution for the reassembly of out-of-order TCP segments is the use of statically allocated reassembly buffers. Although this solution certainly has performance advantages, its lack of scalability, flexibility, and waste of expensive memory resources, makes such a solution unacceptable for large-scale implementations.
There is a need, therefore, for a method and system for the dynamic management of TCP reassembly buffers in hardware.